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| July 8, 2005 | Friday | Jumadi-ul-Awwal 30, 1426 |
IOC expels Slavkov
SINGAPORE, July 7: Bulgarian International Olympic Committee member Ivan Slavkov was expelled on Thursday following allegations of corruption in a television documentary, IOC members said.
Slavkov and Serbian sports agent Goran Takach were shown discussing ways to secure votes for choosing the site of the 2012 Games with undercover journalists posing as business agents in a one-hour programme broadcast in Britain by the BBC just before the Athens Olympics last August.
London won the race to stage the 2012 Games 54-50 over Paris in the final round of voting on Wednesday.
Slavkov has said he and Takach had tried to pull a reverse-sting operation to catch what they thought were “corrupters” of the Games bidding process.
The IOC suspended Slavkov last August and he was not allowed his accreditation for the 2004 Olympic Games.
Their ethics commission launched an investigation into Slavkov and in November the IOC Executive Board recommended he be expelled from the organisation at this week’s Session in Singapore for tarnishing its reputation.
A two-thirds majority of the 114 members at the Session was required for Slavkov’s expulsion.
Three others close to the Olympic movement and familiar with the bidding process also featured in the BBC Panorama documentary.
Takach, Gabor Komyathy, Mahmood El Farnawani and director-general of the Olympic Council of Asia, Muttaleb Ahmad, were also condemned by the IOC at the time.
The IOC withdrew the Olympic accreditations of the four agents and ruled them ‘persona non grata’ within the Olympic movement.
Slavkov was accused in the 1998 Salt Lake City voting bribe scandal that shook the Olympic community but was later cleared.
The IOC investigation into the Salt Lake corruption scandal led to 10 IOC members resigning or being expelled in connection with bribery and to a tightening of the rules governing contact between IOC members and bidding cities.
It resulted in the ethics commission being set up.—Reuters
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